Not an original thought, but worth repeating in light of statements from John Hagee, the almost parodically backward pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. If you’re not familiar with this sun-scorched hellhole, it’s an agglomeration of two-legged lard and squinting eyes which, with or without Hagee, stands as the most charmless U.S. city of over a million people now that Detroit has slid into the high six figures. Dallas and Houston are perennial contenders for this dubious title.
I know some great people from Texas, and they are constantly apologizing for a place they despise and mock as roundly as anyone else. Then again, I’ve taken some pretty nasty drugs without incurring any discernible or permanent side effects, and by the same token a state with 20 million people is bound to produce, in absolute terms, plenty of enlightened, upright folks. Thanks to the Internet I think I have met all 250 of them, and they don’t compensate for the surreal burden of people so backward that it’s often hard to conceive of their interfacing with modern niceties such as cell phones, computers, outhouses, and bronze. So the state as a lumbering, shambling whole cannot be given anything resembling a pass.
Texas’s chief exports are creationism and incoherent drawls, its main carbon-based resources adipose tissue and manure. Ever been to Amarillo? I have, and its claims to fame are a cross at least 150 feet tall standing next to the interstate and the overwhelming stench of what I imagine is a stockyard, although it might just be the local YMCA. Both should be set on fire. Yes, the state needs a wall around it, and no, not along the Rio Grande. Et cetera, et cetera…

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Okay, so the man I’m going to quote her isn’t really an expert psychologist. Actually, he’s not a psychologist at all, but a persistent Christopathic blogging agent who produces post after plaintive post about the usual immoral Gang of Four (scientists, gays, Democrats, and pro-choicers). And he’s not much of an expert on anything besides the questionable art of driving boilerplate wailing about morals and sin with the epistemological panache of a sixth-grader.
I will grant that his prose is unique in that it is eerily evocative of a grinning mule doing a four-legged version of Irish jig with a large, flaming vibrator sticking out of its anus and catching snack crackers in the shape of Jesus Christ thrown by a nine-year-old minister with adrenogenital syndrome. Make of that what you will.
In any event, here’s what this fellow said in response to Ed Brayton’s passing mockery of his garbled take on homosexuality:

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Every once in a while, people aghast at a column — sometimes masquerading as news, at other times offered under no such pretenses — in WorldNut/Wingnut Daily will question whether Joseph Farah, the guy who runs the thing, is really as crazy and ignorant as he seems or if he’s merely taking advantage of the collective rockheadedness and paranoia of the American people. The columns are unquestionably ludicrous, and feature a number of “writers,” themselves unquestionably slack-minded or unhinged, grinding various axes against a panoply of imaginary adversaries and curious fears. But does the general nuttistry of the authors reflect Farah’s genuine beliefs?
To answer this question, you don’t even have to look at the columns themselves.

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Everyone is barking about how electing Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to the presidency would mark a major step forward for blacks and women respectively. This is true, but given that the Democratic nominee will be one of these two people, it’s safe to say we’re already in unprecedented territory. Neither seems likely to defeat McCain, although a brief scan of Gallup.com didn’t reveal whether there are polling numbers that bear out this general and collective hunch, although the site seems to suggest that the citizenry has begun to adopt a collective doomsday attitude toward the economy and other matters. I’m pretty lazy when it comes to the thready political pulse of America, so I’ll leave it to a commenter, or to no one at all, to fill in this blank.
In any case, the wingers are going to be making even more noise than usual for the next bunch of months (and, should a Democrat become president, for at least the next four years). They’re never happy and never will be, but they are always capable of plumbing new depths of bellyaching and reactionary stupidity. Democrats nominally if not functionally control both houses of Congress, and right now, it is virtually assured that the nation’s next leader will be either a liberal masquerading as a Republican, an uppity bitch, or a Negro.
I’m not sure what would satisfy the wingers completely other than a complete dissolution of the Democratic Party. I’m not kidding. There are more than a few people who, if they could push a button and have their wishes magically forced into policy, would eliminate liberals, the ACLU, the United Nations, New York City, California, Massachusetts, homosexuals, Mexicans (and Mexico), most blacks, atheists (actually, all non-Christians), pro-choicers, climate scientists who agree with consensus views on global warming, anyone who agrees with the theory of evolution, most people with graduate degrees, liberal blogs and media outlets, and anyone whose attitude toward guns and weapons is not strictly in line with that of Elmer Fudd, Marvin the Martian, or both.

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Creationists should certainly think so. After all, Google is a handy tool for very quickly catching them doing what they do best — behaving dishonestly. And I’m not talking about the substance of their arguments, which is old news, but how they go about generating those arguments.
When blog commenters skeptical of evolution argue in a coherent, concise, point-by-point manner, you should immediately suspect that they have cut and pasted material from one of the more popular anti-evolution sites out there. Notice that “coherent” and “concise” do not point toward “worth a damn”; by definition, creationist arguments are never persuasive. But some of them, like Nathan Bradfield’s painfully plaintive, misspelling-riddled, and boorish posts, are, if nothing else, clearly the writer’s own work.
Which brings us to a comment to this post from someone who goes by “Reverse Vampyre”. It reads:

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Creationists should certainly think so. After all, Google is a handy tool for very quickly catching them doing what they do best — behaving dishonestly. And I’m not talking about the substance of their arguments, which is old news, but how they go about generating those arguments.
When blog commenters skeptical of evolution argue in a coherent, concise, point-by-point manner, you should immediately suspect that they have cut and pasted material from one of the more popular anti-evolution sites out there. Notice that “coherent” and “concise” do not point toward “worth a damn”; by definition, creationist arguments are never persuasive. But some of them, like Nathan Bradfield’s painfully plaintive, misspelling-riddled, and boorish posts, are, if nothing else, clearly the writer’s own work.
Which brings us to a comment to this post from someone who goes by “Reverse Vampyre”. It reads:

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When going after a political opponent or one of his or her supporters, it makes sense to avoid exaggerating or distorting the meaning or scope of his or her words; otherwise your argument will appear weak. That is, unless you’re the WorldNut Daily or one of its inbred cousins or disciples and don’t actually an argument, and are merely dunking your ass into the collective punch bowl of the internet and generating as much of a local disturbance as your ab muscles and your rank effluvia allow.
Speaking in Wisconsin on Monday, Michelle Obama — whose husband has enjoyed a greater and greater level of bashing by wingnuts as his winning of delegates has accelerated — said this:

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Actually, I’m going with the latter, as always. The thing is, in a blogging environment, the genuine pity I have for brainwashing victims such as Nathan Bradfield does not, I am sure, shine through nearly as brightly as the contempt in which I hold his various jumbled and vacuous ideas, solecisms resulting from a purposeful programming error that has eroded his critical thinking and fair-mindedness abilities just as efficiently as some fungi excavate brain matter.
Nathan has lashed out as a result of what I wrote yesterday, and as usual it’s like watching a child try to scrape a bunch of mud off his hands by rubbing them on his clothes and through his hair. But Nathan is not legally a child, and his output again comes dangerously close to not being legally sane.
First, he complains about the high-flown way in which I take him to task. He should know by now that I do this on purpose because fundereducated people like him are grudgingly cognizant of their lack of facility with English and therefore can’t stand the practiced condescension. Anyway, he writes:

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By an overwhelming 4 to 3 vote, the Florida State Board of Education today approved changes to the language of the state’s public-school science standards that in a sane world would — like most intellectual “compromises” — leave both sides angry.
The good news for those not intent on operating in some pre-Ponce de Leon era is that those standards now include the word “evolution.” The part that more than offsets this is the specific inclusion of the term “scientific theory of evolution.”
Here is where I nominally disagree with PZ Myers’ comments, or at least add a more robust note of consternation to them. Although it’s not the fault of scientists that members of the general public — and not just the godbothering ones — don’t know that “scientific theory” is not synonymous with “wild-ass guess,” this is exactly the mistake people do make, and it would have been nice had the school board taken this into account or at least been more staunch in refusing to accept the language of the current draft. I can see going with the “Ha — the faithful don’t even realize just how unimpeachable a ‘scientific theory’ is scientifically!” point of view, but that same lack of comprehension is what continues causing trouble for fans of reality.

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Nathan Bradfield‘s mind is the philosophical equivalent of an end-stage gutter drunk, a shuddery fantasyland of theocratic creationism whose agonal sputtering and tenacious clinging to safe-mode-like functioning relies on a steady supply of the very toxins that have assured its impending demise. It’s a gruesome and sad tableau, yet from the standpoint of raw biology, fascinating and instructive as well.
Lost cause though he is, Bradfield’s raging-in-a-bubble gibbering occasionally results in unintentional snippets of honesty that reveal the discomfiting reach of religious programming and its goals with something approaching poignancy. Like this:

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